Drobo today introduced their Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini storage systems with Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 interfaces. Both systems also feature automated SSD acceleration for improved performance and reliability. They also come with Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 cables, so you're ready to roll straight out of the box. So, what about pricing and availability? We're expecting those final details in July.

"Both the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini include industry-first SSD acceleration-utilizing the performance benefits of solid state drives (SSDs) and the capacity benefits of hard disk drives (HDDs) to deliver an automated, no-compromise system. In addition to supporting SSDs in any of the drive bays, both units include an additional bay that will accommodate a small-form-factor SSD to achieve significant performance boosts while making all drive bays available for high-capacity HDDs.

The products also support both lightning-fast Thunderbolt (2 ports) and USB 3.0 connectivity, an industry first for storage arrays that will provide flexibility to both Mac and Windows users. The two Thunderbolt ports allow customers to easily daisy-chain devices to accommodate massive growth, and the USB 3.0 port ensures compatibility to millions of USB systems.

Along with SSD acceleration and Thunderbolt / USB 3.0 interfaces, the new Drobo products have been completely redesigned from the ground up with new hardware and software architectures. These enhancements provide a significant increase in processing capability and several optimizations to BeyondRAID that will increase baseline performance by at least five times-prior to the addition of SSDs-easily making the new Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini the fastest storage arrays in their class."